Antiques and the Arts Book Review


Garden Design
By Sylvia Crowe
Garden Art Press, a division of Antique Collectors Club, Market Street Industrial Park, Wappingers Falls, N.Y., 12590, $59.50 hardcover.

Sylvia Crowe's Garden Design has influenced a generation or two of landscape architects and garden designers since it was first published in 1958. Hopefully, this more heavily illustrated third edition with color added will further inspire others to think about gardening's historical antecedents and its structural principles. Crowe describes the qualities inherent in Mogul, Hispano-Arabic, Sino-Japanese, Italian, French, English and other contemporary gardens, teasing out the principles of garden design. She writes, "Perhaps the greatest one of these and the one most lacking in the average garden is a sense of unity. It is a quality found in all the great landscapes based on the rhythm of natural land-form, the domination of one type of vegetation, and the fact that human use and buildings have kept in sympathy with their surroundings. When we say the landscape has been spoilt we mean that it has lost this unity." One of Britain's most distinguished landscape architects, Dame Sylvia Crowe trained as a horticulturist at the old Swanley College in Kent. After WWII, she was closely associated with Brenda Colvin, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe, Peter Shepheard and other leading designers, and played a role in the establishment of the Institute of Landscape Architects and the International Federation of Landscape Architects. In addition to this volume, she is best remember for Tomorrow's Landscape (1956), The Landscape of Power (1958), The Landscape of Roads (1960) and The Pattern of Landscape (1988).

Garden Design

By Sylvia Crowe